1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to environment based navigation systems for industrial vehicles and, more particular, to a method and apparatus for facilitating map data processing for industrial vehicle navigation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Entities regularly operate numerous facilities in order to meet supply and/or demand goals. For example, small to large corporations, government organizations and/or the like employ a variety of logistics management and inventory management paradigms to move objects (e.g., raw materials, goods, machines and/or the like) into a variety of physical environments (e.g., warehouses, cold rooms, factories, plants, stores and/or the like). A multinational company may build warehouses in one country to store raw materials for manufacture into goods, which are housed in a warehouse in another country for distribution into local retail markets. The warehouses must be well-organized in order to maintain and/or improve production and sales. If raw materials are not transported to the factory at an optimal rate, fewer goods are manufactured. As a result, revenue is not generated for the unmanufactured goods to counterbalance the costs of the raw materials.
Unfortunately, physical environments, such as warehouses, have several limitations that prevent timely completion of various tasks. Warehouses and other shared use spaces, for instance, must be safe for a human work force. Some employees operate heavy machinery and industrial vehicles, such as forklifts, which have the potential to cause severe or deadly injury. Nonetheless, human beings are required to use the industrial vehicles to complete tasks, which include object handling tasks, such as moving pallets of goods to different locations within a warehouse. Most warehouses employ a large number of forklift drivers and forklifts to move objects. In order to increase productivity, these warehouses simply add more forklifts and forklift drivers.
Some warehouses utilize equipment for automating these tasks. As an example, these warehouses may employ automated industrial vehicles, such as forklifts, to carry objects on paths and then, unload these objects onto designated locations. When navigating an industrial vehicle, it is necessary to process map data efficiently and quickly in order to formulate these paths. If the industrial vehicle must compare sensor measurements with feature information associated with each and every landmark to compute the vehicle position, the time required to perform the computations requires the industrial vehicle to move slowly and ineffectively. A drawback of an Extended Kalman filter (EKF) approach is that dynamically added landmarks impose an immense computational cost on localization and mapping. To provide accurate localization information in real time, a number of dynamic landmarks being managed by the EKF at any time are minimized.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for facilitating map data processing for industrial vehicle navigation by reducing a number of features to process and/or store to perform vehicle localization.